Morgan Spurlock Interview - Comic Heroes Preview

Get a sneak peek at our interview with the Super Size Me documentary maker about his new film featuring the San Diego Comic-Con...

Get a sneak peek at our interview with the Super Size Me documentary maker about his new film featuring the San Diego Comic-Con...

He’s the man who filled himself with more Big Macs than Ronald McDonald himself, and now he’s making a film about his first love – comics. After seeing the madness that is the San Diego Comic-Con, he poured all his geek love into an documentary called Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope , featuring the likes of Stan Lee and Kevin Smith and produced by Joss Whedon. We chat to him in Comic Heroes 11…

The idea gathered momentum just seconds later when Spurlock told his agent. “He asked how it was meeting Stan and I said, ‘It was amazing, we’re going to make a movie about Comic-Con’. So he said I should meet his other client who was coming to town. Cut to the next day and I’m having breakfast with Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and director of The Avengers . I told him about the film and asked him to produce. He said, ‘Absolutely’. So then I went to the board of directors of Comic-Con and said, ‘We want to make this film, it’s Joss, it’s Stan, it’s me’, and they said, ‘For decades people have wanted to make this film, we’ve always said no, but this time it just might work.’”

You can still sense the excitement in Spurlock’s voice as he explains how the film came together. It’s clearly a sentiment that won over the Comic-Con organisers. “To tell the story that we wanted, the story of Comic-Con, there’s no secret to it,” Spurlock argues. “It’s not like you’re pulling back the curtain and saying, ‘Look how evil it is! It’s ruined comics forever!’ What Comic- Con has done is take something we all know and love and expanded it, to a point where so many other people can enjoy it. If it wasn’t for that Comic-Con [San Diego], there wouldn’t be Comic-Cons all over the country. It set off a chain reaction. But you need their blessing for a film of this magnitude – to get backstage and have the access that we did.”

Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope will be released in the UK in Spring 2012, while the book is available now from Forbidden Planet.